Size Matters

It's been almost five months since we moved to waterless Waterloo from the Wet Coast and we've only just bought our first home.

We are apartment dwellers. Snotty, uptight, high-density neighbourhood urbanites who are swimming in the sea of space out here in southwestern Ontario. In these past months, we've been renting a lovely if creaky old home near downtown Kitchener (and I'm happy to report that Waterloo's sister city is a bit of a dark horse). With a hundred year history, backyard, porch swing and the best neighbours that I've ever neighboured, this home is hard to beat.

The only downside, and for us it has been a gigantic, insurmountable downside, is that the place is Huge. Massive. Colossal. Compared to our 700 sq foot apartment, the 3 levels (not counting the basement), nooks, crannies, rooms, yard and immense pockets of air have all consumed us. Space everywhere. Enough space to get lost in most days. Too much space to clean. Too much space to maintain.

What we have here is a high quality problem.

And so, as we spent months searching all the central areas of both Kitchener and Waterloo for a home to own, we remembered what we want is a Small. What we need is Small. We remembered our minimalist roots. Where we can clean everything in 20 minutes and be out the door. Where we have only a handful of toys and they all live in one box. Where the kitchen is the heart of our home and the living room our nest.

But there was a catch. To live central we could only afford Big. Large. Three towering stories with a chance of old piping and knob and tube wiring. So, on a whim, one day we cast our net a little wider.  Two kilometers was all it took.

We found it. Our home.

This June we will move into our 1100sq ft bunglow. Instead of walking the 10 minutes to work we will walk 30 minutes. Instead of walking to a grocery store, we will bike to the store. Instead of being near a favourite cafe or restaurant we will have a dozen 100 year old pine trees to visit.

We had to make a big trade-off for space. Less space. And happily, that was what we did. In the end, it turned out that our waterloo was not location but space. It only took looking for the wrong thing for us to find what we wanted all along.